Glance Pay: Closing the Tab has Never Been Faster and Easier

It’s a Friday night — you and a dozen of your friends are dining at the busiest restaurant in town. Everyone orders food and a few rounds of drinks, and it’s time to head out to make it in time for your movie. You get the bill and all pull out your credit cards and anxiously wait 10 minutes for the swamped server to return with a card machine. It takes another 10-15 minutes for each person from your party to insert their credit card and pin into the card machine to pay their bill. You arrive at the theater 30 minutes late and miss the beginning of your movie. How could this fiasco have been avoided?

Introducing Glance Pay, the mobile app that wants to ensure you never have to wait to pay the bill again. Now partnered with over 230 restaurants across Canada such as Nuba, Dunn’s, and Fable, Glance Pay makes paying for your meals as easy as a touch of a few buttons. The app automatically detects your location so you won’t have to bother searching up your restaurant. Snap a photo of the bill, select your portion of it, enter in the tip, confirm payment — then off you go! Glance Pay even has a points system that can be used to redeem rewards with participating restaurants.

We had a chance to speak with the CEO of Glance Pay, Desmond Griffin, who was also the CEO and Co-Founder of PayByPhone, to talk to him more about his thoughts on payments, onboarding challenges, and the exciting plans in store for the startup.

Trulioo: As mobile payments is becoming increasingly popular — it is also quickly becoming a target for fraudsters. What are your thoughts on where payment technology is headed in the next couple years and how do you see identity verification and KYC playing a role for securing that future?

Desmond: Mobile is the future in many ways, and especially when it comes to payments. The idea of relying on (easy to lose) credit cards with balances that can be tricky to track, or storing wads of receipts in your wallet already are already becoming outdated.

Anti-fraud technology is one of our priorities with Glance Pay. Since integrating the current version of our fraud-prevention technology into the app earlier this year, the merchants using the platform have experienced zero fraud on Glance Pay transactions. Compare this to Apple Pay, which according to the New York Times experienced fraud in about 6% of payments when it launched – and the merchants suffered the losses!  The incredible amount of technology in today’s smart phones gives us more tools to prevent fraud with, and we see that trend continuing.  Credit card fraud is a huge threat to merchants, this is part of what is driving demand for mobile apps with strong authentication systems and one of the reasons we have been able to sign multi-million dollar licensing technology deals.

Trulioo: Can you tell us a little more about your client onboarding process? What are some of the biggest challenges (regulatory especially) that you’ve come across?

Desmond: Our client onboarding process is detailed but overall very easy for our clients. When a restaurant or merchant signs up with Glance Pay, we find out what point of sale system (POS) they are currently using and ask them some questions about their current consumer interactions and marketing plans.

We can have the client’s location live in under one hour and have all their staff trained in just 15 minutes.

The biggest challenge is getting over that initial hump of getting the owners and management of restaurants or other merchants to simply try out mobile payments because it is new for them. Once they get it though – they are hooked!

Regulations have not been much of an issue to date but moving into the cryptocurrency space will bring the regulatory environment much more into play for us.

Trulioo:  We see that you’re slowly taking over Vancouver, one restaurant at a time! What’s next for Glance Pay? Can other provinces or countries look forward to having your app available in the near future?

Desmond: So much is going on – we are not slowing down anytime soon! We have just signed our first U.S. restaurant in California, Ta’cul Mexican Cocina. We are also opening our U.S. head office right in Silicon Valley. The US restaurant market is very large and we are excited about our opportunities down there. We are already over 230 restaurant locations across 4 provinces in Canada, so we feel that we are in a good position to aggressively expand south as well.

We have recently announced an alliance with Netcoins Inc. as well, which  provides an easy way for people to buy bitcoins, however it is not always as easy to spend bitcoins – Glance will allow users to spend their bitcoins quickly and easily via Glance Pay.

Glance also has a number of licensing deals on the go – Active Pay, Cannapay, Euro Asia Pay.. stay tuned for what’s to come!

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To learn more about Glance Pay and get the latest updates, follow them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram!

If there’s a fintech company you’d like to see featured in our Fintechs in Vancouver blog series, please submit your request to [email protected].

Check out some other fintechs we’ve also featured!

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